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Sunday, March 18, 2007

Sinbad Not Dead!

Wikipedia was again the victim of a prankster, who this time vandalized the profile of US entertainer Sinbad. He posted a entry according to which Sinbad had died of a heart attack on the morning of March 14.

"Somebody vandalized the page," Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez said Friday, quoted by Reuters. "Whoever did this was obviously a prankster. I don't think they did this because they thought he [was dead]." The false entry was caught, and removed, by a volunteer administrator about 30 minutes later, Ordonez said.

Sinbad, whose daughter called him about it, was amused and brushed it off as a "commonplace" occurrence on the easily accessible Internet. "Saturday I rose from the dead and then died again," the Los Angeles-based entertainer told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

Sinbad's page on the free online research tool now carries the message: "This page has been temporarily protected from editing to deal with vandalism."

Wikipedia, which was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, has grown into one of the biggest virtual communities in the world, with faithful and enthusiastic members, all driven by the noble purpose of making information accessible freely to any one at any time.